Donald Trump on Corporations

2000 Reform Primary Challenger for President

2002: Participated in development boom of Jersey City

Jersey City at the time had been coming off one of the largest building booms in history. Top developers, including Donald Trump and suburban home builders such as
Toll Brothers and K. Hovnanian Homes, were putting in thousands of new residential units.
The tallest building in NJ, the Goldman Sachs Tower, designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli, had been planted along the waterfront just a few years earlier.
With so much new construction, they were calling the downtown area around City Hall a gold coast, permanently transforming a city once left for dead.

0% corporate tax would create millions of jobs

We need to lower the U.S. corporate tax rate from 39 percent to zero. America's corporate tax rate is the second highest on the planet. The international average is 26 percent.
How can we expect companies to hire American workers and locate their business in America when our government taxes them at exorbitant rates for doing so? That's crazy. I want to encourage American companies to stay here and hire
American workers, and I want foreign companies to relocate their businesses to the United States and create jobs here.
We are the greatest country on planet earth--the world's companies want to be here. A zero percent corporate tax would create an unprecedented jobs boom. Millions of jobs would materialize.

Fight crony capitalism with a level playing field

One thing the Tea Party folks and the Occupy Wall Street people can and should agree on is tackling the rampant problem in the Obama administration of crony capitalism. We've already seen with Solyndra and
Fisker how the president's pals and big time campaign donors all got sweetheart loans and deals and stuck taxpayers with the bill. I predict we haven't heard the last of it and that the
Obama administration engaged in many more cases of funneling money to companies connected to the president and his donors. Mark my word.

I love capitalism enough to protect it. There has to be a level playing field where everyone can compete fairly.
The guy swinging a hammer all day shouldn't have the government reaching in his pocket and handing his taxes to Obama's big shot donors. It's wrong and unfair.

Wealthy move assets around globally based on tax incentives

[Trump's tax proposal] in 2000 was to impose a one-time 14.25% tax on the assets of people and trusts worth $10 million or more. Conservative critics attacked the plan, using arguments similar to those made by Trump today to deride Obama's proposal. Pat
Buchanan, who was then Trump's main opponent for the Reform Party nomination, said the tax proposal would prompt the wealthy to move their money out of the U.S.

When questioned, Trump also argued that the tax would drive the wealthy to shift their
assets, the developer dismissed those concerns: "Well, I just think that the booming economy that we create by my plan would keep the money here because it's incentive. They're going to want to be where the action is. They're going to want to be where
the good economy is. And they move their money around, hey, including me. You move your money around where the action is, and now it's a real world economy. But this country would be booming. We'd have no debt. It would be unbelievable."